Jimmy Lee Sudduth

Born Caines Ridge, AL 1910-died Fayette, AL 2007

Jimmy Lee Sudduth's fertile imagination has led him to paint self-portraits, dogs, television personalities, and the architecture and landscape near his home in Fayette, Alabama, as well as views of New York and other cities. In Big City Skyline, rows of people filing across a bridge toward a crowded mass of towering skyscrapers emphasize the anonymity of life in America's large cities. Sudduth's materials—mud mixed with sugar water and color extracted from weeds and vegetables—are no less inventive than his themes. He rarely uses canvases or brushes, preferring to use his fingers to paint with clay, mud, sand,
and soot on plywood.

A self-taught artist who began painting as a very small child, Mr. Sudduth was renowned for the effects he could produce with his own handmade paint, which consisted of mud blended with a variety of common substances including sugar, honey, Dr. Pepper, coffee grounds, plants, sand and soot.Mr. Sudduth called the mixture sweet mud. Applied and worked with his fingers, the mud assumed contour, line and form. Painted on materials he could find such as scrap lumber, sheet metal and most commonly plywood, Mr. Sudduth's art often depicted everyday life in Alabama portraits of houses, farm animals, churches, people, his dog Toto and himself. It also included paintings of far away places such as Washington landmarks and New York City skyscrapers. His art is in the permanent collections of The Smithsonian Institution and many other major museums and private collections around the world. A prolific artist who could finish half-dozen pictures or more in a day, Mr. Sudduth was once asked why he never used a paintbrush. I paint with my finger cause that's why I got it, and the brush don't wear out he said quoted in a catalog of one of his exhibitions. When I die, the brush dies. Mr. Sudduth died on September 2, 2007 at the age of 97.